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Manji named TOP’s leader for election

Luke Malpass Political editor

The Opportunities Party, TOP, has announced former Christchurch city councillor Raf Manji as its new leader to take the political minnows into the 2023 election.

Manji, well known in Christchurch after stints on the council and in various community roles, will be the fourth leader of the party, which has competed in the past two elections but has never made it into Parliament.

The party was founded by economist Gareth Morgan in 2016 and hit 2.6 per cent of the party vote under Morgan’s leadership before declining to 1.5 per cent of the party vote under former Treasury official Geoff Simmons’ leadership.

‘‘We need to become a more sustainable society – socially, environmentally and economically. By many indicators we are at breaking point, we need deep structural change, and fast, if we are to prosper over the coming decades,’’ Manji said in a virtual event announcing his leadership.

Manji, a former currency trader who spent time at Bankers’ Trust and Lehman Brothers during his career, acted as Labour mayor Lianne Dalziel’s finance person on Christchurch City Council. He also stood as an independent for the Ilam seat in 2017, running primarily on Christchurch earthquake rebuilding issues, where he placed a distant second to then incumbent National MP Gerry Brownlee.

He was heavily involved in the council’s response to the March 15, 2019, terror attacks.

Manji, 55, is now based in Wellington. He migrated to New Zealand in 2002 and describes himself as a social progressive but fiscally ‘‘radical’’. He was born in north London to a Pakistani father and Irish Catholic mother.

In a continuation of the party’s philosophy,

he is a proponent of the universal basic income (UBI) – a policy which would see all New Zealanders paid a universal basic income which would replace virtually all current welfare payments.

‘‘The world has really shifted, so for me the monetary and fiscal system needs to be redirected to supporting the outcomes that we want, as opposed to being dominated by leverage and speculation and the ease of capital zooming around the system,’’ he said.

‘‘We’ve seen the last 30 years of one crisis after another. So you know, those issues are coming to the fore.’’

A rebalancing of the tax system towards land taxes and away from taxing income would also be top of the party’s agenda.

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2022-01-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

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